Category Archives: Political commentary

Legal Asylum Seekers

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Asylum seekers protesting on the roof of the V...

Asylum seekers protesting on the roof of the Villawood immigration detention centre in Sydney, Australia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Kevin Rudd and Labor had my preference back, but they have lost me again.  And no, I won’t be supporting the other lot, who are (slightly) worse. 

Asylum seekers are legal, no threat, modest in numbers, and not a major problem for Australia.  Our major parties and mainstream media have refused to stand up and speak these simple truths.  They prefer to pander to the ignorant shock-jock fear mongers.

Who’s Extremist?

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[I sent this to The Canberra Times Sunday (24th).  Still waiting for a response, though it’s highly apposite to the local Senate race, with Zed Seselja having ousted Gary Humphries from number one on the Liberal Senate ticket, and Simon Sheikh being a vigorous Greens candidate with at least an outside chance.]

“Left wing” and the “most extreme government in Australia”, is how Jeremy Hanson chose to label the ACT’s Labor-Green Government upon winning the local Liberal leadership recently.  Clearly he was singing from the current Liberal Party song sheet, which seeks to label the Greens “extremists” at every slight opportunity.

Now that local Liberal Zed Seselja is gunning for the national stage in the Senate, we should put these claims in a little perspective, and examine who is extreme and who reflects “good common-sense values”, to quote Hanson again.

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A Dramatic Shift to the Right

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Part 1 of 3 on Independent Australia.  These three pieces are taken from my long essay The Rise and Failure of the Radical Right:

DitchTheWitch

“In the first of a three part series, Dr Geoff Davies considers the worldwide shift to the political Right since the 1980s, and how traditional conservatives have now become radicals.”

 

 

What if Gillard Were to Lead?

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English: Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gil...

Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Published at Independent Australia 19 Jan.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s October parliamentary speech, in which she systematically tore down Opposition Leader Tony Abbot for his persistent misogyny, got a big reaction world-wide.  Why?  Because it is a problem not often addressed in mainstream politics, and because of her obvious passion and authenticity, delivered with devastatingly articulate precision.

In all the discussion that followed, about whether this was routine parliamentary posturing, about why the commentariat was caught off-guard, about whether she is hypocritical about other issues, one question was missing.

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The Destruction of the USA

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One can write of the decline of the USA, and that has already been noted many times.  One can write of the collapse of the USA, and that arguably is in process.  But neither characterisation would capture what is now happening to the USA.

The USA is being destroyed before our eyes.  The nation with the greatest military defences in history, by far, is being taken over and sacked.  Like Singapore in World War II, it’s guns are pointing in the wrong direction.  This time the destructive horde is not Japanese soldiers rattling overland on bicycle rims, it is people who claim to be patriotic Americans.

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PC in the US: Comrades Ike, Abe and Dubya

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[In my previous post I noted how radical is our far-right compared with a few decades ago, and how savagely they enforce political correctness.  Here is Richard Eskow at Campaign for America’s Future explaining the US equivalent.  Of course it’s more virulent in the US, and of course we follow where they go.]

 

A well funded network of right-wing extremists wants to make it socially and politically impossible to express the ideals that made this country great. One of those extremists appeared on their billionaire-funded network this week to attack Elizabeth Warren, and anyone else who isn’t on the far right, as a Communist.

How retro, you may be saying to yourself. They haven’t pulled that trick since the Eisenhower era.  That’s the strangest part of all this: They seem to think “Eisenhower era” is a euphemism for “Bolshevik control.”

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The political correctness of the radical Right

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[Just published on ABC’s The Drum Unleashed.  It is distilled from The Rise and Failure of the Radical Right.]

What currently passes for political commentary includes excited discussions about whether the Leftist Labor dog is being wagged by a“toxic” Greens tail; why right-wing Labor is in dire straits; whether centrist Labor is resurgent; and whether the extremist Greens are doomed.

Balance, in political commentary, is supposed to lie somewhere between Labor and Tony Abbott, who often seems to be regarded as just a somewhat aggro conservative.

Such commentary reflects remarkably limited perspectives that fail to take into account two major developments over the past five decades. The first is the rise of the radical Right. The second is the manifest failure of radical Right policies.

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